"Although Rep. Josh Green sympathized with supporters who have been affected by the artificial sweetener aspartame, he was unable to immediately pass a bill that would ban the artificial sweetener aspartame in food products without concrete evidence showing a connection between aspartame and medical ailments. We can't take numerous amounts of products off Hawaii store shelves without evidence of a connection, he said."

Did anyone actually think lawmakers would ban aspartame? They would have to ban about 6000 food products. Not likely.

I’ve been a television news reporter for 34 years and I have won the Hawaii Medical Association Distinguished Medical Reporting Award five times. I didn’t win those awards for going on TV and telling people how to be healthy. I won the awards for reporting the AMA company line; the newest drugs, the latest surgery, and the most advanced methods of zapping cancer with radiation.

So here’s my health story. I suffered from migraines and panic attacks. Doctors prescribed drugs for both conditions.

Since my teenage years I endured excruciating migraines, a type of headache called Cluster Headaches. These are also known as “suicide headaches” because the pain is so intense you want to kill yourself. On many occasions I went nearly delirious with pain and beat on my own head in a frustrated, impotent rage. My doctor told me he had one patient who tried to claw his own eye out because of the pain. Imagine an “ice cream headache” -when you drink a very cold, icy drink too fast and have a searing pain for a few seconds. A cluster headache is many times worse than that, but it lasts several hours. For these headaches physicians prescribed opiates and also put me on a cousin of LSD known as Sansert (Methysergide maleate). This drug gives you hallucinogenic dreams. The doctor told me I had to take it. The dreams were really wild, a Technicolor acid trip every night. So my doctor basically prescribed a mild form of LSD to prevent my headaches. What the doctor didn’t realize was that cluster migraines are not caused by a lack of Sansert.

Later on in my adult life I started getting panic attacks. It is impossible to describe a panic attack. Your heart starts beating out of control, it feels like you cannot get a breath of air into your lungs, and you have a feeling of absolute terror as the more you try to breathe the less you feel like you can get a breath, you lose muscle control and feel like you are going to convulse and drop dead in the next few seconds. It is like someone just injected you with a powerful drug that makes you feel as scared and miserable as is humanly possible. Hence the name Panic.

The panic attacks had me leaving work and fleeing to an emergency room. Doctors assured me I must take Paxil. I asked them about the number of patients on SSRIs who have committed suicide. The doctors assured me that I had to take Paxil or risk a nervous breakdown. What the doctors didn’t understand was that panic attacks are not caused by a lack of Paxil.

But according to mainstream medicine headaches required the hallucinogenic Sansert and panic attacks called for an SSRI. Take 10 minutes to write a prescription, get the patient out the door, next patient, a new prescription.

I had heard several interviews with Dr. Russell Blaylock and I began to wonder about food additives. So I did my own research. I found out things my doctors didn’t know. I read as much as I could find about Asparatame and MSG. Could Aspartame and MSG have caused my excruciating headaches and paralyzing panic attacks? I used to drink one diet Pepsi with lunch every day at work. I used to eat sugarless candy containing aspartame. I used to chew sugarless gum, also loaded with aspartame. When I read about this drug and learned that Mr. Donald Rumsfeld helped inflict this poison on society I decided to stop ingesting it. Instead of drinking one diet soda per day, I drank water with lunch. I threw out the sugarless candy. I stopped chewing gum. I now read every label of everything I consume. I don’t eat aspartame.

MSG was a hard one. It is in everything. I am a vegetarian and I used to cook with a powered vegetable broth that I purchased at my local “health food” store. The main ingredient was “hydrolyzed protein.” I looked that one up and discovered it is MSG. MSG has many hidden names. (Do an Internet search for “HIDDEN MSG”) Those bastards!

I now make my own vegetable broth. It’s easy. Two onions, chopped, three carrots, chopped. One stalk of celery, chopped. Six cloves of garlic. Drizzle some olive oil and toss on some sea salt. Roast in the oven until everything begins to darken and caramelize. Toss the veggies in a pot with about 8 cups of water and simmer for an hour. Strain and you have a great broth for soups, stir-fries, and it has no MSG. Does it take time and effort? Yes. Does it beat writhing on the floor with a pounding, excruciating headache? Absolutely.

I stopped eating at restaurants. This is difficult when you’re a news reporter on the go. I take my own food with me. I know about 5 places in Honolulu that don’t use MSG. When I go to the grocery it takes longer for me to check out because most of the food I buy does not have a bar code. I buy fresh whole foods. I make just about everything I eat from scratch.

Guess what? I stopped having migraines and panic attacks. Now this is what we call “anecdotal” evidence. It is not a scientific study and no medical claims can be made from my personal testimony. I won’t even put this on the local news as a story. But when I eat something with “autolyzed yeast” or “natural flavoring” I get knocked down with terrible headache. I realized that my heart would race and my breathing would become labored after consuming anything with aspartame, even one diet soda. The more you clean up your diet the more sensitive you become.

Do not wait for the government to take action. Just stop eating these poisons. You are in charge of your own health. No one is going to do it for you. We hear so much about “health care” costs, but think about it- if you are truly healthy you don’t need care. There is no cost incurred from health and wellness. Health “care” is Orwellian doublespeak.

Do you think there’s going to be Medicare when we grow old? I don’t think so. We’re in charge of our own health. * The author of the above piece is in error. The vote has been delayed until Wednesday.

A reader responds:

XXXXXXXXX: The transcription of your comments is really very good, except that I must disagree with you that the government can't or won't ban a product in 6000 products. Yes, Rumsfeld forced it on the market, and yes, we can force it off, either by one state banning it and the rest doing it in a domino effect, or by direct pressure on the next FDA commissioner, which can only be arrived at by massive public pressure even outrage at failed state level legislation, thanks to corporate lobbyists eviscerating bills and even medical testimony in committee hearings.

Did you know several as many as five physicians commented in letters to Dr. Josh Green, which mysteriously were never rendered to the committee?

Now, thanks to his reprieve for relevant testimony, dozens of physicians from all over the USA are writing to him and to the entire committee and to the Senate committee.

I encourage you to write also, but please don't discourage or discredit a bill when it is still alive. Josh Green is not the final stop; there is still the Senate bill, and further, Josh has kept the hearing open till a vote on Wednesday.

Now that would be some real news, which ever way that Health committe votes.

If I were in your shoes, I would be investigating why the Hawaii Department of Health Director parrots corporate perfidies about how "safe" aspartame is supposed to be, thanks to those 200 industry paid for studies....

Best wishes, and please let me hear from you if you have questions, since I am the one who wrote the legislation for New Mexico which was routed by corporate lobbyists in 2006 and 2007, and now comes alive again in Hawaii, where it has not "sputtered and died" at all.

For a state whose sugar fields and mills are relatively no longer functioning because of artificial sweeteners, I would be aghast to have lobbyists representing the very corporations like Ajinomoto and Merisant destroying truly beneficial consumer protection legislation, like they did in NM and like they may be close to doing in Hawaii.....

You see, Dick, the FDA erred in 1981 in approving aspartame at the insistence of Donald Rumsfeld, so he could make $12-15 million, despite the FDA turning it down from discovery in 1966 to 1981.

If we can't correct an error in judgment by the FDA, ever, through state legislation or through pressure on the FDA directly, what pray tell becomes of our vaulted democracy, anyway?

Maybe you could arrange for part or all of Cori Brackett's definitive DVD on the medical effects of aspartame, from the point of view of a recovered victim of diet soda poisoning, to be aired on KITV? We have Adrian Chang, the nuclear engineer in Honolulu who fought fluoridation in the legislature, with dozens of copies, and I am sure he would be happy to bring you on, to get you and your viewers completely up to date on the ghastly neurodegenerative truth about aspartame/methanol/formaldehyde/diketopiperazine.

Respectfully,